Stop watching dashboards. Start understanding systems.
Observability is not collecting metrics. It is building real visibility to understand what is happening, why it is happening, and what to decide before the business feels it.
Not everything that alerts explains.
Observability field notes
Guides, explanations and hard-won lessons for understanding observability without getting lost between dashboards, alerts and tools. Every article is anchored in something that actually happened.
A room full of folders nobody ever opened again
My manager's office was full of folders — years of samples, carefully taken, carefully filed, and never opened again. The data existed,…
Metrics, logs and traces: three questions, not three tools
Before anyone called it observability, I was the monitoring system: ten phone calls every morning and one word in a document. That…
Five providers, five dashboards, one cash machine
When an ATM went down, the first hour was not spent fixing anything. It was spent deciding whose problem it was, in…
Your observability bill didn’t grow. Your telemetry did.
You are not billed for how many people used your system. You are billed for how much your system talked about itself…
Latest articles
The most recent from the field notes. This list updates itself. See all articles →
The name does a lot of work. Here is what it actually is
The name sounds like a wall of screens and somebody counting down. What it actually is, past the brochure, is more modest…
Everyone names one lock. There are two
Everyone can name the moat: CUDA, they say, and the conversation moves on. There are two locks, and the second is why…
There is no cluster network. There are six
When somebody says the cluster network, they are describing something that does not exist. There are six, each with a different job,…
The network that cares about the worst case, not the average
Every network I built for twenty years optimized for moving a lot of data on average. This one does not care about…
🎬 When I am not writing about systems
I also produce Mujeres que hicieron historia, a video series about forgotten women in history. It is in Spanish, and it is the other half of what I do.
Watch the series ↗